Field of the Invention
This application relates to a database compression system and method.
Description of the Related Technology
A database is an organized collection of data usually stored in digital form. There are many database designs and implementations, but the general concept common to all is to be able to store, update, and/or retrieve data from the database. Databases generally organize information in the forms of tables and records or entries. Each record or entry may have multiple fields or “attributes” with each attribute having a variety of possible values.
Depending upon the environment, database performance is critical to the system and/or the end-user experience. This performance, typically measured in read/write times, often determines the type of database used and the storage device upon which the database is implemented. The type of storage device generally is a hard disk drive or a pool of hard disk drives. Hard disk drives are popular because they are relatively affordable for the storage capacity offered. However, hard disk drives suffer from slow disk access times. To improve performance, many database systems are being implemented with solid state drives (SSD). The SSD is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store data, and offers markedly improved data access times that significantly speed up database performance. However, SSDs are expensive, and the ever increasing amount of data to be stored in the SSD-based database only exacerbates the issue.